The instant invention relates to systems for expelling powder materials from mailpieces. More particularly, the instant invention pertains to a cutting system that cuts openings in mailpieces to permit the expulsion of air and powder from the mailpieces while maintaining the privacy of the contents of the mailpieces.
Recent events have led to the realization that unscrupulous individuals may attempt to use the postal delivery system as a vehicle for spreading terrorism. These individuals have, for example, contaminated mailpieces with biological agents (such as anthrax) and distributed such mailpieces to targeted locations via the postal service. While the extent of damage that may occur by using mailpieces as a carrier of biological agents has yet to be determined, the potential for significant health risks is clear. Accordingly, increased efforts have been set forth toward the development of systems and processes that may be effective in detecting contaminated mailpieces within the postal delivery system prior to delivery to their final destination.
One such proposed system involves snipping the corner off every mailpiece (to create an opening at the corner of the envelope), placing the snipped mailpieces in a jogger system, operating the jogger system for approximately 3 minutes, pulling ambient air through the jogger system, monitoring the pulled air with two systems (one to test particle size and one to capture powder in a filter for subsequent lab testing of the material captured), then banding the mailpieces in a conventional banding machine to squeeze air out of the mailpieces (compression step), and finally sampling the air from the banding operation with the above two air-monitoring systems to determine the presence and nature of any powder materials prsent in the airflow. The air pulled through the individual workstations in this process is moved through a HEPA filter and vented outside the work area. Operation of this system is a time consuming process, with manual steps taken between each operation.
In the proposed system, once the air-monitoring filter has been tested for the presence of a biological agent, the mailpieces are unbanded and moved to a separate area for sorting and final distribution if the results of testing are negative. If a biological agent is detected however, the facility is shut down until decontamination can be performed.
One of the problems of the proposed system is that the corner snipper only creates one small opening at the corner of the mailpiece. Thus, in order to ensure that some of the powder material that may be present in the mailpiece gets expelled during the compression step, the jogging step must be sufficiently long enough to ensure that the powder is moved across the mailpiece to the opened corner. Therefore a more efficient method of cutting open mailpieces is desired that enhances the probability of ensuring that powder is expelled from the mailpiece during the jogging and/or compression steps and which reduces the overall processing time of the system.